Operation Featherweight: Month 14, Week 2, Day 7.

More details have begun to emerge of Turkey's ground invasion of Iraq that took place on Monday (7/9/15) night. It now turns out that Turkey sent 230 - roughly a company - Special Forces soldiers into Iraq as part of the six hours of air-strikes that were carried out by more then 50 aircraft. It has still not been confirmed if this operation has come to an end or whether the Turkish troops are still in Iraq.

Turkey's justification for this action was that of "Hot Pursuit." The problem with that is Hot Pursuit is more of a defence then a justification. Under the United Nations Charter one nation is not allowed to send its troops into another country without their permission - the principle of territorial integrity. If this does happen and the wronged party complains to an institution of the international community such as the UN Security Council (UNSC) one thing that may stop the international community from punishing the aggressor nation is them being convinced that it was a genuine accident.

After all in the heat of battle it is impractical for soldiers to stop get out their compasses and compare their maps to local landmarks to make sure they haven't crossed an unmarked border. This is what is known as Hot Pursuit. Obviously the expectation is that as soon as the troops realise their mistake they withdraw and issue an apology to the wronged nation.

What appears to have happened is that rather then accidentally crossing into Iraq in the heat of battle Turkey has planned this operation by assembling such a large number of Special Forces - I don't think Britain's SAS has 230 soldiers - and sending them into Iraq with close air-support. As such Turkey's actions are not covered by Hot Pursuit and seem to be an intentional violation of Iraq's territorial integrity. It also represents an escalation of Turkey's prior violations of Iraqi territory with attack aircraft. If the UNSC even continues to function as a body of the international community it must censure Turkey for it's violations of international law.

Today Australia which has been part of Combined Joint Task Force: Operation Inherent Resolve (CJTFOIR) - as the US led coalition is formally known - and conducting air-strikes in Iraq since October 2014 announced that it will start conducting air-strikes within Syria as well. The Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott also announced that Australia will be accepting 12,000 refugees from Syria.

While I don't have the exact legal details it seems Australia's plan will be very similar to that of the UK's with the refugees being picked up from camps close to Syria's border and then granted Australia's equivalent of a humanitarian visa as part of a resettlement program. The key difference is that although no further details have been given Australia indicated that it would only be accepting refugees from "persecuted minorities" which sounds like a polite way of saying "No Muslims."

I find this extremely problematic because in the first instance it strikes me as extremely racist. Beyond that though the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) have been very keen to portray CJTFOIR as a Zionist Crusade against Islam. Australia turning around and saying that it doesn't want Muslims in their country seems to be doing most of ISIL's propaganda department's work for them.

Also ISIL is openly trying to ethnically cleanse Syria of minorities such as Christians and the Yezidi. In order to counter that crime against humanity I would have thought that these minorities would be the last people we would want to move out of Syria and the first people we'd want to move back. We certainly shouldn't be rushing to moving them to Australia which is literally on the other side of the World from Syria.

Although I think is really the only word you can use when describing the huge masses of people we see on our TV screens every day now when we don't know who they are or where they are from the term "Irregular Migrant" can be extremely problematic when talking about the situation. That's because it covers everything from the illegal economic migration you see from Mexico into the US right the way through to the refugees fleeing war in Syria and a mind-boggling array of variations in between.

Australia's long running and often heated debate over immigration is much more similar to the situation of illegal, economic migration on the US/Mexico border then the debate within the European Union (EU). Although there is an issue with the treatment of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar (Burma) there are several very large countries between Burma and Australia and in the opposite direction there is India and Bangladesh. In fact a large part of the reason why the Rohingya are persecuted in Burma is that the Burmese view them as illegal immigrants from Bangladesh.

Prime Minister Abbott campaigned and was elected on a platform of stopping these illegal economic migrants entering Australia. Although the name of his policy "Sovereign Borders" struck me as something of a personal insult I must say that he has broadly got the right solution to Australia's problem. The central part of the plan is that these migrants who arrive by boat will simply never step foot in Australia instead being sent to processing camps in near-by Papua New Guinea for processing and deportation. By removing the promise of a new life in Australia this policy removes the product that the often brutal people trafficking gangs are using to lure in their victims.

However it remains a very controversial topic within Australian politics with conditions in these processing camps said to be so bad the Abbott's government has actually passed a law making it illegal to report on the conditions in the camps.

By announcing that Australia is going to be accepting refugees from Syria it is clear that Abbott is extremely worried that his own party and supporters will see him as caving into his opponents. Therefore in what seems to be an effort to convince people that he's still a tough guy Abbott has also decided to approve a US request for air-strikes in Syria that Australia has been 'considering' for a couple of months now.

As with UK Prime Minister David Cameron and his drone strikes this is no way to run a war. As I mentioned on Monday (7/9/15) CJTFOIR is operating at only around 10% of its capacity. Therefore the reason why this war is dragging on with little sign of progress is not a lack of air-craft or nations to provide them. Instead the problem is that there is a complete lack of a strategy of how to use those resources to defeat ISIL.

I'm still of the opinion that members of CJTFOIR refusing to join in with air-strikes until that strategy has been formulated is probably the most effective way of exerting pressure on US President Barack Obama to pull his finger out and hurry up and draw up a plan.

On the subject of Prime Minister Cameron's own Rambo fantasies they continue to receive dramatic and intense criticism from the UK itself.

Last night, just as I was possibly too drunk to be commenting on it and possibly should have gone to bed, a British Airway's (BA) passenger jet flying to London, UK burst into flames on the runway at McCarran International Airport in Las Vegas, US. All passengers were evacuated safely with only a few minor injuries reported.

This plane was of course flying on the same route that saw a BA jet being diverted to Montreal, Canada on July 29th (29/7/15) over a hoax bomb threat that seemed to protest the start of Turkey's air-strikes against Iraq's Kurds. However the scene of a civilian jet in flames on a runway invoked scenes from the ongoing war in Yemen.

What has provoked so much alarm and concern over Prime Minister Cameron's new found fetish for drone strikes is a worry that he is following the example of US President Obama who is widely considered an idiot in military and most other matters.

Dubbed "The Drone Queen" by intelligence insiders Obama has got this idea into his head that almost any security problem in the World can be solved by simply crossing names off a kill list with drone strikes. After all his killing of Osama bin Laden was so successful it spawned an Oscar winning - albeit wildly inaccurate - blockbuster movie.

Israel has long practised this strategy of targeted assassination using teams of actual assassins, helicopter gunships and conventional strike aircraft long before anyone had even invented the drone. Although the Israelis are not famous for being overly concerned for Arab lives even they have began to question this type of strategy and warn others against it.

In Israel's experience it leads to what they term the "Treadmill of Killing." Essentially every time you kill a terrorist another simply steps in to their place and the situation remains the same. So then you have to kill that person too. Eventually you find yourself in a situation where you are killing people on a daily basis simply to stand still. This can have an extremely damaging effect on the psyche of the nation that is doing the killing by numbing them to the violence and making killing an everyday part of life. The ease at which Israeli settlers seem able to burn Arab children alive in their homes could well be the product of this normalisation of extreme violence.

Aside from the moral implications this strategy of targeted assassination simply will not work to defeat ISIL. Although ISIL are a terrorist organisation the way that they are operating in Syria and Iraq is as an army of occupation. Therefore the only way they will be defeated is by a larger, more powerful ground-force going in to force them from the territory they hold and freeing the local population they are holding hostage.

From the way he has completely refused to co-operate with the Kurdish People's Protection Force (YPG) and the way he seems to block every effort being made by the Iraqi Security Forces (ISF) to liberate parts of Iraq Obama seems utterly terrified of the notion that ISIL can be completely and rapidly defeated.

Obama's love affair with drones has caused a very particular set of problems within Yemen. When the US drone operation in Yemen began - admittedly under President George W Bush - Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) as they've since become known were - in terrorist terms - essentially just a couple of guys sitting around talking about how they would like to liberate Mecca and the whole of Saudi Arabia from the ruling al-Saud family who they view as infidels.

Amid rumours of the greatest bomber maker the World has ever seen being based in Yemen Obama massively stepped up the drone operation there relying almost exclusively on intelligence provided by Saudi Arabia. Since then rather then weakening AQAP have grown into one of the most dangerous terrorist organisations in the World second only to ISIL.

It is my belief that Saudi Arabia has systematically been providing the US with selective and sometimes false information about AQAP's leadership. The idea being to get the US to kill AQAP leaders who are opposed to Saudi Arabia so Saudi Arabia can replace them with people loyal to the Kingdom. To borrow a phrase from a Peruvian General who was trained by the CIA's "School of the Americas" program; "Within AQAP the US has created a vacuum. Saudi Arabia has then filled that vacuum."

Under this new found supervision AQAP have begun to extend their operations across the Gulf of Aden into Somalia where they have helped build al-Shabaab into a much bigger and nastier organisation then they were when President W Bush attacked them in 2006. This new arc of terrorism is also threatening other east African nations such as Kenya and Ethiopia in what seems like a deliberate attempt to intimidate developing nations into not signing up to a climate change agreement that would benefit them greatly but perhaps damage the market for Saudi Arabian oil.

In January 2015 AQAP had grown to the point where they were able to carry out a week long series of terror attacks beginning with the attacks on the Charlies Hebdo magazine in Paris, France where this climate change agreement is set to be signed at the end of the year. Although it is difficult to speak on behalf of more then 7bn people the reaction to these Paris attacks across much of the Muslim World was exactly the same as it was in the rest of the World - outrage.

This was particularly true in Yemen where the people rose up to overthrow the government that they saw as sponsoring AQAP and their attacks. This made Saudi Arabia furious and they promptly gathered Arab states who owe them money along with the US to launch a brutal war to re-impose their puppet government. Although resources such as time didn't allow me to continue I did cover the start of this war which I dubbed "Operation Gold Beard."

Even in a World where we have become numbed by ISIL's violence Saudi Arabia's war against Yemen still manages to shock by the sheer scale of it's inhumanity. Yemen is a dirt poor country that imports around 90% of it's food. The first thing that Saudi Arabia did was to impose an air, sea and land blockade on Yemen preventing that food from being imported. Several months on what we are seeing is a man-made famine with people literally starving to death in the streets.

Despite this on April 28th (28/4/15) Saudi Arabia intentionally bombed a plane belonging to the International Red Cross on the runway of Sana'a international airport specifically to prevent them distributing humanitarian aid. This is despite the Red Cross being specifically protected under the Geneva Conventions. In fact it is the Red Cross that holds and advises the international community on the Geneva Conventions.

The scenes from Las Vegas yesterday would have been instantly recognisable to anyone familiar with Saudi Arabia's attack on the Red Cross in Sana'a.

This week the Technical Executive Committee (TEC) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) is holding a meeting in Bonn, Germany. Unlike last week's meeting this doesn't deal specifically with negotiating a new climate change agreement. However it seems extremely likely that many of the technical issues discussed will end up in the technology section of the new agreement in some form or another.

As such I was initially concerned that the UK was bringing up AQAP as a way to intimidate developing nations such as Kenya by reminding them that they are under threat. After all my current ceasefire is fragile and strictly limited to ISIL. For example there was Sunday's (6/9/15) antics and the Paula Radcliffe story seems intended to baffle experts in things like engineering with topics such as physiological chemistry.

However earlier of Tuesday a man was arrested at the Garden City Mall in Nairobi, Kenya carrying what appeared to be explosives in an apparent terrorist attack. Fortunately it has since emerged that this was a fake bomb.

Therefore far from needing to be reminded about the terror threat Kenya in particular is well aware of it and seemed to be passing it up the UK Commonwealth chain of command demanding something is done about it.

21:20 on 10/9/15 (UK date).